From City Journal, November 21, 2025:
Three decades ago, the visionary social thinker Peter Huber published Orwell’s Revenge, a book that turned one of the twentieth century’s most haunting political parables on its head. Where George Orwell imagined a future of total information control, Huber saw the opposite: a world where digital technology shattered centralized authority. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth could rewrite history because it monopolized the tools of communication. But in the digital age, Huber argued, the networked computer would scatter those tools across society, producing an unruly democracy of voices. The Internet, he predicted, would not empower “Big Brother” but millions of “little brothers”—individuals able to report and argue and publish. What once seemed a one-way flow of information from elite institutions to a passive public was becoming a many-to-many conversation. The gatekeepers were being evicted by the code....
....MUCH MORE
This is precisely why authoritarians and totalitarians, in government and out, feel they absolutely must control society's discourses.
And that urge to control is why the observation that the censors have never been on the right side of history has become a truism.
